AR&D Reinventing Local Media

How is it possible in 2009 that a big, prime time extravaganza can leave it soley to the audience to take all its clips? The Emmys put on a solid show this year, but try to find any of the great moments on the Emmy site and you will be disappointed. The Academy of Television Arts & Sciences (ATAS) has lost its chance to benefit from what will surely be many viral videos to come out of the 2009 Emmy show.

Thank God for the viewers. They’re the ones who posted the good stuff on YouTube.

There are some strange ironies here. Prior to the show, it seemed it would be the “webbiest” ever. The E! preshow had celebrity Tweets. The people behind the Emmy site used a Flip camera for some Red Carpet interviews. The promos for the Emmys featured host Neil Patrick Harris (who did an excellent job) with a kid who livetweeted everything he said. Indeed, the Academy did a good job livetweeting attwitter.com/primetimeemmys.

So where is the actual show video? And how is an online user supposed to navigate this?

For starters, there is confusion between the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) and the plain ol’ ATAS. ATAS was the original, but the two split in 1977. The National Academy is responsible for the Daytime, Sports, News, Public Service and Technology Emmys. Its site is at emmyonline.org. ATAS does the awards most people think of as “The Emmys,” the big TV awards show.

There is also an International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. Best to leave that one alone.

The Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (no National) runs the big show, and its site is at emmys.com.

It turns out Emmy.com is a two-page family site with a picture of a girl and her dog, from Emmerdale Farms. Surely ATAS could offer a little money to pick up the URL and make things a little more convenient for us (and help the farm while they’re at it)? Even sillier - Emmy.tv is a placeholder page for a John Murray, whom I contacted via email. He tells me he has been a NATAS member for 10 years and intends to use the site to showcase his work.

So, once you’ve navigated your way through the Emmy sites and found the one for TV, you’d think you’d get a pretty goodwrapup. Sadly, you get squat. There is one video from the show - Neil Patrick Harris’sexcellent song-and-dance opening number. Want anything more? Go rogue.

One of the great successes of internet content has been Dr Horrible’s Sing Along Blog. The inexplicably funny short film (originally released in three parts) won an Emmy this year. It so happens Neil Patrick Harris (our host, remember) starred as Dr. Horrible. People have been begging for a sequel. Who shows up in the middle of the Emmys? Harris, in a Dr. Horrible short along with his co-stars. The original Dr. Horrible, when it was released online crashed servers. Demand for this clip should be through the roof. CBS, however, won’t profit a bit.

We need to learn from this. It’s a simple lesson: give the audience what it wants, or it will go elsewhere. All the use of the cool tools in the world won’t mean anything if we don’t deliver on the big goods.

Check out USOpen.org for another fascinating experiment in online multicasting. The site is streaming all its tennis matches live, and it even allows picture-in-picture so you can monitor a second match. There’s chat along with the games, too, making this a social experience.

The picture quality is excellent – you’d be fine if you hooked this up to a large monitor or even your TV. It’s wide-screen and HD. Is it as good as broadcast? No. But for tennis addicts, it’s amazing. It also allows people to watch during Web’s prime-time – 9am – 5pm. (Sorry, employers.) This is an excellent execution for another reason — there is advertising along the top and bottom. It’s unobtrusive yet unmistakable. Advertisers get the branding the whole time. Imagine that for a three-hour game.

It’s not a stretch to go from here to other sports. In fact, the MLB does this already with its MLB Live product. For that, you have to pay. But tennis is hurting a bit in the U.S. right now, so the multicast is one way to capture more audience. The NCAA Final Four tournament offers something similar to this as well.

We have to recognize that these systems allow sports and networks to do an end run around us. Professional sports continues to cut back its access to local media, and here’s an example of why. The more the sports can control their own product, the less they need us. You can call “fault” on them if you like, but for sports, it’s an easy ace.

The inauguration was an event that was truly worldwide, and the Web was seriously stressed with traffic. The broadband video traffic pushed the Web to its limits, and many people experienced slowdowns – or even outages – as they tried to watch video. Wrote James Klatell at CBSNews.com:

“We here at CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties due to an unusually high number of requests…Clicking around to some of the other major news outlets, they seemed to be having similar issues. CNN.com had a note posted for potential viewers who came to see the historic moment. “You made it!” the message read. “However, so did everyone else.” The only thing to do? Wait in a line online.”

Depending on where you were and when you tried to log in, you may have struck out entirely. Mike Wendland of the Detroit Free Press found trying to watch video a maddening experience:

“I tried them all – Freep.com, MSNBC, Fox, ABC, CNN, the New York Times, CSpan and others – and without exception, they all failed. After about eight minutes into the speech, I had sporadic luck with the Washington Post stream, which, despite hiccups, delivered the only available live stream I could find on my Comcast broadband connection. Judging by the running commentary on chat rooms form others who couldn’t get the video streams, my experience was the norm.”

But those who did get through set records. CNN heavily promoted its coverage on Facebook. It wound up with traffic triple its previous record. According to C|Net, as of 1 pm EST, 18.8 million viewers had tuned in to the live feed, with 1.3 million concurrent live streams watching President Obama’s inaugural address. The numbers stretched CNN to its limit. Many visiting the live feed were put into a digital queue and had to wait for a “space” to open up.

The CNN Facebook Application paid off in promotional value as well. As of 1:15 PM EST, 600,000 “status messages” had been set using the app. An average of 4,000 status updates were set every minute. Millions of Facebookers checked in during the inauguration. CNN got plenty of facetime on Facebook.

Mogulus broke a company record, with 105,000 concurrent users and more than 1 million total users. Twitter was running at four-five times its normal rate. I experienced slowness updating with it, and I wasn’t alone.

Akamai notes that Tuesday was not a record day for Web traffic. Election Day, 2008 holds that honor. In fact, Inauguration Day traffic barely makes the top five. But alas – all that video…

It’s not surprising that the inauguration put such a stress on the system. To use the cliche, this was a “perfect storm” of demand. It peaked at Noon ET – prime time for the Web. It was video-driven, and was an event with international interest. Remember that much of our audience was at work, and because we were providing so much information online, we were doing the first job of journalism: informing.

So does this mean that video doesn’t work online? That the Web will never support a big video-driven event? Hardly. It only proves two things:

1. The enormous demand for online video
2. The woeful state of broadband in the U.S.

The pipes will get bigger and faster. The demand will grow. The infrastructure will support the Big Events. In the meantime, “normal” Web video traffic is supported very well. In the meantime, it’s good to see media outlets embracing complimentary technologies like Twitter and CoverItLive to supplement their TV coverage.